Saturday, 08 April 2017

My 13 hours of darkness

I had several episodes in the wee hours of this morning of partially awakening, in a confused state. Notably, I kept having the feeling that it was Tuesday.

Then Huckleberry started pestering me. What, is it 0300 or something? Come on, the alarm light hasn't come on yet, so it's not even 4.

But... the digital clock wasn't lit up either. And things were much darker and quieter than normal. Yup: no electricity.

OH, NO! WE'VE BEEN CAST BACK INTO THE DARK AGES! HOWEVER WILL WE SURVIVE?

Checking my cellphone, it was just after 6 already, and still dark on account of being cloudy out there (this last determined by looking out the window). The phone has been running on battery for just about 6 hours, indicating that the lights had gone out just after midnight. Hm.

Have a rather minimal sort of breakfast, without opening the refrigerator.

Take a stroll around the neighborhood. Get drizzled on. See no sign of either obvious-from-the-sidewalk damage or repair crews. Return home.

Look up PG&E on the cellphone's browser. There's an outage map, which includes a piece of this neighborhood. Says power's been out since 11 minutes after midnight, a crew found wires down, and a repair crew is en route.

Do some off-line reading. Take another stroll. No sign of a repair crew. Get sniffed by a French bulldog. A neighbor says the lights went out at 3 minutes past midnight, with a loud noise.

Spot a PG&E truck, out the front window! It comes down the side street, turns, then retreats up another side street.

Take another stroll. No sign of the truck; apparently it fled the battlefield without stopping to engage the enemy. Maybe just a scout.

Visit PG&E's site again (still on the mobe; I'm topping up its charge from a battery-powered charger). Still says crew en route. Register for updates via SMS.

Read some more. When do the rioting and looting start?

Gets to be 1045, and I get a text from PG&E! Says a crew is on scene, and they should have the power restored at 2030. YIPE!

Decide to leave the refrigerator closed, splurge on a restaurant meal, and pick up some ice on the way home to stuff in the refrigerator and freezer.

1100: Off to Panda Express. Do I know how to splurge, or what? No PG&E trucks visible, but B.A.T.S. is setting up traffic markers, so maybe there's something going on.

On return from lunch & ice-acquisition, find that PG&E has surrounded the block across the street (I don't actually live on a block, as such; my house is on the edge of the neighborhood).

Decant the ice into gallon zipper bags to prevent leakage, and put them in the icebox.

1300, just about on the nose: Electricity! Sweet, blessed electricity! The lights are on, and at least one fan is humming! WE'RE SAVED!

Um. There's not enough noise coming from the office. Did somebody not power up? Somebody did, indeed, not.

The server - properly a bastion host - had not come back up. A bit of poking and prodding suggested that, while the power supply was putting out the standby 5V, the main supply was failing to start up. After however many years of nearly-continuous operation, it had succumbed to an unclean power cycle.

So, off to Fry's. Buy a replacement, of nominally the same model. Unpack it. Remove the old one. Note that the new one isn't quite the same model; the disk power cables are better, and the 12V connector for the CPU has 8 pins instead of 4. Er? Well... it looks like it should work. Hook everything up, and run a smoke test: success!

Put everything back together, bring up the server, turn on the workstation, and all's more or less back to normal.

Now I need to reset various timekeeping devices, and maybe do something productive with the rest of the day. Or not.

Why did the power have to be off on a rainy day, when going outside and playing wasn't such a good option?